Death of a Chancellor (11 page)

But it was the second page that lifted his spirits. ‘There has been a most moving meeting in the drawing room this afternoon,’ Lucy had written. ‘The two children had asked
specially to see me. They came in hand in hand, Thomas looking very solemn, Olivia looking as though she had been crying. I asked them what the matter was. “It’s Papa, Mama,” said
Thomas. “Yes, it’s Papa,” said Olivia in a doleful voice. “What about Papa?” I said. “We don’t think he’s coming back soon like you said. We think
he’s gone back to the war.” “We think,” Olivia went on, sounding as if the two of them were a Cabinet committee just emerged from a special private session, “we think
he’s gone back to South America. Where he was before.” “South Africa, Olivia,” Thomas corrected her, “it’s South Africa we think he’s gone back to. And we
think he’ll be gone for another year like he was last time.” “A year or more,” said Olivia who had no idea how long a week is, let alone a year. I showed them your letters,
Francis. I promised them you were in England. I got out the map to show them where Compton is and how there was a symbol on there for the cathedral. Part of me wanted to laugh, they were so serious
about it all. So you see, when you do come back, and I pray God it is very soon, you’ll have to tell them you haven’t come back from the wars, only from the west of England.’

Powerscourt had now arrived at the offices of Drake and Co., solicitors, with their fine views over the Cathedral Close.

‘Wills?’ said Oliver Drake, shaking his visitor warmly by the hand. ‘You said you wanted to look at those. Do you mind doing it in my office? With all due respect I don’t
think I should let you take them away.’

‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt as he drew out the pages of his three sermons, Lazarus, the tongues of men and of angels, and the parable of the fig tree. Drake took out the three
wills and handed them over to Powerscourt. The easiest one to forge, Powerscourt felt sure, would be the one that came from the firm of London solicitors, Matlock Robinson in Chancery Lane. With
the text typewritten there were only three signatures to add. He peered closely at John Eustace’s signature. The hand looked almost identical to the text of the tongues of men and angels. He
could see no difference either in the Eustace signature on the other two wills and the sermons he had brought with him. He knew that there were people, particularly on the Continent, who claimed
that they could analyse personality from handwriting and definitively state whether or not a signature was genuine. But he knew too that no English court would accept such evidence. He was not
likely, he decided, to make any progress here.

‘Mr Drake?’ Powerscourt handed back the three wills. ‘Thank you so much. I have to confess I am none the wiser after comparing these various bits of handwriting. Now I must
make for the station.’

Powerscourt was settling himself into a first class compartment on the London train when a familiar figure, clad in clerical black, swept past. The Dean was carrying a large and
impressive-looking briefcase. He looked, as usual, as though he felt the world would not function properly, might indeed fall off its axis, if he was not managing as many of its affairs as
possible.

‘Powerscourt, good morning to you. Can’t stop, I fear. I have a compartment reserved up ahead. There is much to do.’

‘Good morning to you, Dean. Are you going to London on the Bishop’s business?’

The Dean snorted. ‘The words business and our Bishop do not sit together well, Powerscourt. Do you know the story? It is old now, but everybody in Compton knows it.’ The Dean paused
and looked at his watch. ‘I have just time to tell it you. We do not leave for a couple of minutes.’

The Dean abandoned his position by the door of the compartment and sat down opposite Powerscourt.

‘Nine or ten years ago it must have been now, the previous Bishop died. Salisbury was Prime Minister, normally very good at ecclesiastical appointments. Not like that old rogue Palmerston
who couldn’t tell a crucifix from a chasuble. No idea at all. Salisbury takes his time. Eventually he slips the name past the Queen. Moreton’s the man for Compton. Moreton. Salisbury
tells the happy news to his Private Secretary, leaves him to get on with it. Only one problem, Powerscourt, there are two Moretons at large in the upper reaches of the Church of England.
There’s Professor Gervase Bentley Moreton of Oriel College Oxford, expert on the textual differences in the early versions of the Four Gospels and precious little else. And there’s
William Entwistle Moreton, then headmaster of one of our great public schools, Marlborough or Rugby, can’t remember which. Private Secretary Schomberg McDonnell looks up Moreton in his church
directories. Finds the Oriel Moreton. Writes to him with news of his appointment that very day. Always admirably brisk in the way of executing business, that McDonnell. I sometimes think he’d
have made an excellent dean. Oriel Moreton replies by return of post, accepting the position. Tells his college. Tells his friends. Tells
The Times.
Only thing was, McDonnell had got the
wrong Moreton. It was Headmaster Moreton who was meant to be Bishop of Compton. But by then it was all too late.’

The Dean, after this splendid example of brotherly love and Christian charity, looked at his watch again. The train was beginning to move.

‘Must go now, Powerscourt. I have much business to attend to.’ He glanced at his briefcase as if he could see the papers inside through the dark blue cover. ‘I should be
through with all this by Reading. Probably just on the far side of Reading to be on the safe side. Do come and see me then.’

‘And who do you think I am?’ Lord Francis Powerscourt was crouching down in his own drawing room in Markham Square later that evening.

‘You are Papa, Papa!’ said the voices of Thomas and Olivia Powerscourt in unison.

‘Do you think I am here in our house?’

‘Yes, Papa, yes!’ shouted the children.

‘Am I in South Africa?’ Powerscourt shouted back.

‘No, Papa!’

‘Are you sure, Thomas? Are you sure, Olivia?’ Powerscourt prodded each of them in the chest.

‘Yes! Sure!’ The noise must have carried as far as Victoria station.

‘Am I here in London?’ Powerscourt shouted once more.

‘Yes, Papa!’

‘Not anywhere else?’

‘No, Papa! No!’

‘Very good then,’ said their father, rising to his feet. He thought the children could have carried on shouting all night. ‘Off you go now. I’ll come and see you
later.’

‘I hope that may reassure them a bit,’ he said, readjusting his waistcoat and smiling at Lady Lucy. Johnny Fitzgerald was looking closely at a wine label on the sofa. Powerscourt had
told them both about the strange goings-on in Compton just after he arrived back in London. Now he wanted to take their advice.

‘Lucy Johnny,’ he began, ‘what do you think I should do about Augusta Cockburn? Should I tell her that I think her suspicions were justified, that there was something strange
about her brother’s death?’

‘It’s a contradiction in terms,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, still inspecting the writing on his bottle. ‘Couvent des Jacobins, it says here. I know my French isn’t
world class but
couvent
says convent, nunnery to me, lots of ladies in black habits and wimples praying all day and all night, that sort of thing. Jacobins says French revolutionaries to me,
violent and unstable fellows, their brains addled with cheap red wine and garlic, endlessly denouncing their colleagues and sending them off to the bloody guillotine. What are they doing on the
same bottle, Francis? If the nuns had their way they wouldn’t have let any Jacobins inside the nunnery, if the Jacobins had got in there wouldn’t have been any nuns left alive. I
don’t understand.’

Lady Lucy smiled as she handed him the corkscrew. ‘Maybe you can tell from the taste, Johnny. As to Mrs Cockburn, Francis, I think you are morally obliged to pass on your suspicions.
I’m not sure but I think that must be the right thing to do.’

‘You haven’t met the woman, Lucy. Please God you can get through the next few months without that privilege. Augusta Cockburn is a monster.’

Johnny Fitzgerald now had a dreamy look on his face. ‘I think the Jacobins must have won out against the nuns,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of spicy, raring to go. Just the thing
to sample before you charged a few barricades. I don’t think you have to do anything at all about the Cockburn connection, Francis. Let it wait. Any number of things could happen in the next
couple of weeks. You haven’t been engaged on the case for very long. And,’ he went on cheerfully ‘you haven’t had me around to help you. Things are about to look up.’
And with that he took another large mouthful of his Jacobin Couvent.

‘Think of it this way,’ said Powerscourt, still wrestling with his conscience. ‘What if the brother did commit suicide? I still think that’s the most likely explanation.
Or, much more unlikely, what if he was murdered, though I can’t for the life of me work out how that might have been done. If it was murder, there may be more murders. And if it was suicide
and it was your brother wouldn’t you want to know?’

‘Francis,’ said Lucy, trying to ease her husband’s way, ‘you don’t actually know any more than this Mrs Cockburn woman. She had her suspicions. You have yours. But
there’s nothing more than that, is there? You haven’t got any evidence at all. So why not tell her that you are continuing with your investigations and leave it at that?’

Powerscourt didn’t look happy with that. Johnny Fitzgerald was looking at the fire through the red in his glass. ‘I’m ready for anything, Francis,’ he said. ‘One or
two more glasses of this stuff and I’ll be fit to storm the Bastille single-handed. I do wonder, mind you, if it mightn’t be necessary to sample another bottle of this revolutionary
brew. It mightn’t taste quite as uplifting as this one. You do have some more of this stuff, don’t you, Francis?’

‘Lots more,’ said Powerscourt, grinning at his friend. ‘But look here, Johnny. There’s the business with the wills. Oliver Drake implied quite strongly at the last
meeting that there was something fishy about the Cockburn will that left her all the money. It was as if he didn’t quite believe in it.’

‘When was it dated?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘How long before he died?’

‘It must have been about six or seven months before his death, when he was staying with Mrs Cockburn the sister up in London,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But suppose he wasn’t
actually staying with Mrs Cockburn at all. Suppose it happened like this. Here’s Mrs Cockburn, always hard up, always moving house all the time to cheaper property, as one of the servants in
Fairfield Park told me so happily. She decides to forge a will for her brother, which leaves most of the money to herself. Even if there is another will she can still use the fake one to contest
it. End of money problems for Mrs Cockburn.’

‘You’re not suggesting, are you, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, looking slightly shocked, ‘that Mrs Cockburn was the murderer, or that she organized some hired killers to
murder her brother?’

‘I don’t think I’d rule it out,’ said Powerscourt after a pause for thought.

‘But,’ Lady Lucy went on, ‘there’s a flaw in your argument. If she was the murderer, why did she ask you to investigate the business?’

‘Cover, Lucy, it could just be cover. What better proof of your innocence could you offer than hiring an investigator to look into a murder you have committed yourself? It’s the most
disarming thing you could do, virtually guaranteed to make everybody believe automatically in your own innocence.’

‘Just because you don’t like the woman,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘doesn’t mean that you have to wish she’s going to end up on the gallows.’

‘Let me just say one last word on the subject,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘You two have not actually met this virago in the flesh. You have not faced her insults and her
rudeness. If you ask me, hanging is far too good for her.’

Blissfully unaware that he had recently been described as a most unsuitable young man, Patrick Butler sat looking at a set of figures in his office in Compton. To call it an
office was to pay it a great compliment, for it was really much more like an attic than a place of business. The command post of the
Grafton Mercury
was on the top floor of an old building
in a side street some distance from the Cathedral Close. To gain admittance visitors had to climb a rickety set of stairs that creaked out the details of every new arrival. Inside there was just
enough room for the three people who worked there, and then only one could stand fully upright. There was a large map of the county on one wall and back copies of the newspaper piled up against the
others. A small and rather dirty skylight admitted an inadequate amount of natural light. Patrick felt sure that the newspaper editors in the great cities of Britain must have enormous offices with
well-tended fires and handsome paintings lining their walls. But he knew that he would never be as proud of any future office he might inhabit as he was of this tiny garret. This was his first
command.

The production of newspapers is a complicated business requiring considerable powers of organization and discipline. Every week Patrick and his colleagues displayed those virtues to the full. In
their everyday lives, however, they did not reveal any sign of such powers. Their little office was a shambles. There were scraps of paper, empty bottles, cigarette butts, opened books overdue at
the local library, old bills lying all over the floor. The desks, as they referred to the rough trestle tables where they wrote their stories, were virtually invisible. Piles of paper,
half-finished articles, draft copies of advertisements, old editions of the national newspapers were scattered about in cheerful abandon. Every now and then Patrick and his colleagues would rouse
themselves to action. The floors would be swept, the tables cleared of their accumulated detritus. For days afterwards one or other of them would complain that a piece of paper full of vital
information had been lost, or that the full list of all those persons attending the Rotary Club luncheon could not be found. Patrick was a great believer in printing lists of persons attending
functions, however humble. He believed that human vanity is always flattered when a person sees his or her name in print. Word of this stupendous fact travels fast round the little community. The
person or persons are duty bound to purchase a copy of the
Grafton Mercury
to see their name in print. Maybe even two copies, as this is such an important edition.